DEPARTMENT MISSION

The mission of the Department of Mathematical Sciences reflects that of IU South Bend as a whole, and includes teaching, scholarship, and service. We endeavor to provide a broad education in quantitative reasoning and higher level mathematics that encourages creativity and emphasizes general concepts and approaches as well as specific job-related skills to prepare students for workplace responsibilities after graduation. We endeavor to perform original research and scholarship in mathematics, and to make our work available to the general scientific community. Finally, we attempt to provide service to various individuals and groups, including professional societies, the local community and schools, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the University as a whole.

Department Goals

1. Teaching Goals

To offer a suitable curriculum to students who are following a degree program in mathematics. These include students who are majoring, minoring, or pursuing associate degrees in mathematics.

To provide all university students with a strong foundation in mathematics appropriate to their chosen fields. For instance, we seek to provide students in the sciences with a curriculum meeting the requirements of their disciplines, to provide students in business with essential skills in areas such as finite mathematics and calculus, and to provide students in education with material directed towards the teaching of elementary and secondary school mathematics.

To maintain and refine current programs, and to continue to develop new programs to meet the needs of current and future students.

2. Scholarship Goals

To perform research in mathematics which is directed both toward the frontiers of our discipline, as well as toward addressing problems in fields including the natural sciences, social sciences, business, medicine, and engineering. The goals of such research include new discoveries, concepts, insights, structures, theorems, algorithms, techniques of proof, fertile conjectures, and applications of new or known techniques.

To synthesize, or integrate, existing scholarship, such as in the publication of textbooks, surveys or review articles, book reviews, annotated bibliographies, and lists of open problems.

To perform research in the teaching and learning of mathematics which leads to new insights into various ways in which knowledge and skills can be effectively taught and learned.

3. Service goals

To provide various services to the scientific and professional communities.

To engage in a variety of activities related to the recruitment of new students.

To work in cooperation with regional primary and secondary schools to help improve the educational experiences of their students, and also to consider their advice to help our programs.

To participate in faculty governance of the University.

Implementation of Goals

The following is a partial list of those activities carried out by the department which implement the goals listed in the previous section. Many of these activities have components in more than one of the three areas of teaching, scholarship and service. The following is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather indicates the wide scope of department activities.

Advising students in the department's degree programs in planning their academic programs, and assessing their progress in and certifying the successful completion of these programs.

Designing and developing curricula, courses, laboratories, assessment tools, and instructional materials for teaching mathematics at the university level and below.

Cooperating with other academic units to develop interdisciplinary courses and programs.

Designing and developing software or hardware that provides new or improved tools for communicating teaching and learning, or for supporting research in mathematics and its applications.

Developing internship programs and other professional opportunities for students.

Disseminating the results of our research to the scientific community in the form of books or monographs, articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings, talks at professional conferences or meetings, technical reports, or software.

Organizing and lecturing in seminars in mathematics, both at the level of research and at levels suitable for students.

Maintaining a departmental technical report series.

Directing students in independent research projects.

Acting as referees for papers submitted to scholarly journals and proceedings, reviewing papers, serving on editorial boards or professional society committees.

Organizing professional conferences or workshops, or organizing panels, special sessions, and other scholarly activities at such conferences.

Seeking funding in support of scholarly activity.

Preparing, administering, and grading the regional mathematics contest for secondary and middle school students, sponsored annually by the Department.

Acting as consultants within our disciplines to other departments, educational or governmental institutions and agencies, to scholars in other fields, or to business or industry.

Serving as advisors to student clubs such as the IU South Bend Student Chapter of the Mathematical Association of America.

Providing general university service through, for example, committee work at the college, campus, and University-wide levels.